Are men expendable? After millennia of vigorously hoisting their species to the top of the food chain, is XY now a barrier to additional progress? Has the ball game for “dudes” expired? Will the future be self-reproducing super-women? With males”¦ extinct?
How is gay marriage in America proceeding down the aisle? This question concerns all transhumanists because persecution of homosexuality is an anti-Enlightenment human rights violation that is rooted in archaic religious superstition and anti-scientific thought. Actively supporting gay marriage is the ethically responsible position for all progressive transhumanists.
British biologist Robert Edwards, who developed the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), has won a Nobel Prize. But the Vatican says the choice of Professor Edwards was “completely out of order.”
We’re now in the first afternoon of the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Today George Dvorsky and I are live-blogging from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. We’re in the Biomedical Research building with about fifty people in attendance. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Nah, I don’t think so. Nor are they about to tell us everything we want for the development of public policy. The following is edited from an article I published in Quadrant about a decade ago.
Many of the controversies in bioethics and medicine today stem from differing views on life: when it begins, when and how we should protect it, and what our views on life say about our culture and society as a whole.
The whole discussion about what we’ll find immoral in the future got me thinking about that little group often described as our collective “future”: children. We often hear about children as our future when someone says, “Think of the children!” or “We shouldn’t leave this problem for our children to solve!”
British biologist Robert Edwards, who developed the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), has won a Nobel Prize. But the Vatican says the choice of Professor Edwards was “completely out of order.”
How is gay marriage in America proceeding down the aisle? This question concerns all transhumanists because persecution of homosexuality is an anti-Enlightenment human rights violation that is rooted in archaic religious superstition and anti-scientific thought. Actively supporting gay marriage is the ethically responsible position for all progressive transhumanists.
Last year, JET published Kristi Scott’s fascinating article Cheating Darwin: The Genetic and Ethical Implications of Vanity and Cosmetic Plastic Surgery, which analyzed the implications of cosmetic plastic surgery (CPS) for relationships and genetics. It suggested that since “what one sees is not necessarily what one will get in regards to DNA” that “there is a responsibility on the part of the individual to disclose any previous CPS.” However, there are many other instances where we misrepresent our genetics or interfere with evolution. These range from other cosmetic enhancements, to medicines that allow the unhealthy to survive and the infertile to reproduce. But if we want a better future, we need to become comfortable with bending the principles of evolution to our will, and understand the risks and rewards of doing so.
I’ve now read the full (138 page) judgment in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger. To be candid, just reading it with a degree of care took me quite a bit of time, so I won’t be spending a similar amount of time writing a detailed commentary. Let me make just a few quick points.
Given the current state of technology, reproductive cloning is not a safe and effective means of human reproduction. Cloning reduces genetic diversity, is beneficial neither for the child nor the parent, and without restrictions could create many legal and social problems.
The FAB Congress in Singapore looks at the global aging population and feminization of it, which includes issues of migrant women elder care workers in a global economy, notions of ecological citizenship and human and nonhuman interdependency.
Citing a new study in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, The Globe and Mailreports that Canada experienced a significant drop (36.9 per cent) in teenage births and abortions between 1996 and 2006. This is attributed to better access to contraception, better sex education, and changing social norms, but not to a decline in actual sex among teenagers. Rather, Canadian teenagers are now more likely to use condoms and/or the contraceptive pill than was the case in the mid-1990s.
The poor cloning debate has turned into a thoroughly-beaten dead horse and yet, here I find myself, brandishing a fresh cudgel and eying the rhetorical equestrian corpse for some worthy target. Let me begin by doing something people rarely do when debating issues like this: state what I am actually defending.
More than 60% of those who voted in a recently concluded IEET reader poll say that human cloning should be allowed. However, two-thirds of those in the affirmative (42% overall) say it should take place only after being proven safe.
Bryan Caplan sure knows how to market a book. With one polemical paragraph, Caplan has managed to get a host of blogs to write about his upcoming book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.
In this third installment of the 2020 Visionaries series [Part1] [Part2], we look at the future of the global environment and of democracy — two areas of concern that will increasingly intertwine in the next 10 years.
Personhood is everywhere. Netflix recently added Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends to their “instant play” repertoire, which means I may or may not have spent several hours watching a cartoon from the early sixties as part of my Saturday routine. As usual, there was a little bit of transhumanist propaganda hidden within it.
It’s all very well to enunciate lovely-sounding values like Joy, Growth and Choice ... but in real life we’re faced with difficult decisions. We’re faced with choosing one being’s joy over another’s, or choosing joy versus growth in a given situation, and so forth.
Over at Science Progress, Andrew Plemmons Pratt reports that US District Court Judge Robert Sweet handed down his judgment last week in the long-running dispute about gene patents. This case is based on litigation brought by a coalition of groups that have sought to challenge the controversial patents owned by Myriad Genetics on two genes connected to breast and ovarian cancer.
What general values can we identify as important, beyond culture-specific or species-specific or otherwise context-specific moral codes or ethical values?
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US scientists clone human stem cells
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